Four Indonesians have been arrested in the United States charged with conspiring to ship arms illegally to Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger guerrillas and customers in this country.
The arrests last week in the US territory of Guam and the mainland state of Maryland have further lengthened the list of Indonesians suspected of illicit arms purchases.
This latest case was linked to the smuggling of surface-to-air missiles, machine guns, ammunition and night vision goggles worth US$900,000, according to US officials.
Erick Wotulo, a retired admiral, was nabbed in Guam together with his accomplice, Haji Subandi, while Reinhard Rusli and Helmi Soedirdja were held in Maryland. The Indonesian Military (TNI) has denied any links with the illegal procurements. The four are allegedly conspiring with two other foreigners, a Singaporean and a Sri Lankan national.
While these men may have acted on their own, dodgy deals among members of the armed forces are nothing new to the Indonesian public.
In June, it was revealed that an Army general, the late Brig. Gen. Koesmayadi, had amassed a significant stockpile of weapons in one of his houses. This was later explained away by an TNI investigation as the accumulation of an arms "collector", reasoning that seemed extremely unlikely because all the weapons were new.
In April, two Indonesians accused of trading illegal arms worth US$1 million were tried in an American court in Hawaii. In the same month, the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) probed an alleged case of fraud in the purchase of two Russian-made Mi-17 helicopters by the Army.
A more famous case was the bribes allegedly paid by British tank manufacturer Alvis Vehicle Ltd. amounting to US$31 million in the mid-1990s to president Soeharto's eldest daughter, Siti Hardijanti Rukmana, to secure the purchase of 100 armored cars, including Scorpion light tanks, to Indonesia. The case implicated a number of top army generals.
Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono has admitted that the military is badly in need of extra income due to the limited defense budget, which covers only a third of military spending.
Marking up purchases, a practice that has been going on for decades in arms procurements, can not be ended overnight. As the minister has said, minimizing the offense is the most realistic objective.
This does not mean that the government has done nothing. Last year, it introduced the "one-stop" policy that gave the sole authority to the Defense Ministry to select and buy arms for the military, procurements that have to be conducted through open tenders. In the past, each arm of the military was allowed to purchase arms itself.
More military markups stirred up a heated debate between the House of Representatives and the government early last month. The government had decided to buy 32 armored vehicles from France for the Indonesian peace-keeping forces in Lebanon, but the House found the US$890,000 price tag for each tank too expensive.
To be fair to the TNI, it is not the only government institution engaged in such corruption – it is hard to find a state agency not tainted with procurement scandals.
Even KPK agents have been convicted of graft. High-ranking police officer Suparman was sentenced to eight years' jail last month for extorting money and goods from a witness in a corruption case.
Graft involving government officials and businessmen probably makes up the longest list of abuses. Unfortunately when the government began focusing on these cases, the people who were targeted seemed only to be the least politically connected, not the worst offenders.
Open bidding in the procurement of goods is often seen as a way to preempt graft but the World Bank country director Andew Steer thinks otherwise if it involves "prequalified" bidders. "Once a bidder knows who else is prequalified, it makes it a lot easier for them to collude," he said.
This underlines the tough task facing the government in its battle against corruption.
The government and the people are facing an uphill struggle to fight this cancer. The level of difficulty in ending bad governance is generally commensurate with the length of time a country has maintained such a closed system. It will take some time before transparency becomes a normal part of Indonesian life.